Ours is no bloody battle
With woe and horror fraught
Our joust is of a gentler kind
A measuring of Mind with Mind
A tournament of thought

—Willard Fiske, "The Conquest of the Field of Chess,"
published in Chess Monthly, May, 1857.

Willard Fiske, Cornell's first University Librarian, was a scholar
and book collector. Fiske was also considered one of world's experts
on the subject of chess. In addition to Chess Play, he wrote
the influential Chess in Iceland, 1905, and The Book
of the First American Chess Congress, 1857, which was regarded
as one of the seminal textbooks on the subject.